Users of personal computers, telephones, switching systems, etc. communicate by means of a keyboard or other well known structures. The machine to which interface is made responds in some manner such as by displaying print on a display device, such as a monitor, or by providing an acoustic response. Where a system is provided that can be used in a variety of countries or locations in which the users speak a different language than the language of the manufacturer of the equipment, a translation of the response resulting from the input (command) is required.
It is desirable to provide a response to the user in natural language. However there are a number of problems associated with providing a human machine interface in several natural languages. For example, natural language words and phrases consume a lot of memory space. For commands and responses, there is a great deal of redundancy in the various words and phrases that are used. An example of such a structure and method containing substantial redundancy is found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,365,315 issued Dec. 21st, 1982 by Donald J. Kamnik.
When processing commands and reporting results to an operator, the phrases and words must be indexed and organized such that very quick matches and retrievals are possible.
An apparatus which is utilized by a user may have more than one input/output (I/O) port and allows commands that are entirely unrelated to be executed at the same time. This forces the dictionary search to provide access to all words and phrases at the same time. Since the entire human machine interface must be expressed in terms of phrases from the dictionary (and not hard-coded) matching and retrieving are required to be done hundreds or thousands of times for each command and response. This necessitates that all such dictionaries are stored in random access memory (RAM) for very fast processing. With an extensive library for translation of many languages, this can become extremely expensive, especially for consumer type items such as telephones. For larger systems, such as telephone switching systems, the excessive RAM required just for the language dictionaries could make the system uncompetitive in its markets.
Accordingly such apparatus such as telephone switching systems have operated in one language only. Those that do operate in a second language have corrupted the natural phrasing in the language to be translated to so that the phrases can be stored in parallel with the original phrases. Further, they can rarely operate in more than one language simultaneously.
Typically, such systems are slow to respond to the user in that they must load a particular set of phrases for each "form" that the user would like to program. This is inflexible and frustrating for the user.